When I was a ten-year-old, in 1962, I determined when I would know the future had arrived, a determination made while watching the animated television sitcom, The Jetsons. When that show’s characters spoke on the telephone, they could see each other on a video screen. I knew then that if I ever saw such a thing in real life, I would be living in the future. As noted, I was ten, not understanding at that time that any moment beyond the present is the future.

Well, here we now are with our smartphones. We are long pass the age of computers being the size of rooms and now have ones that fit in our pockets. They do more than allow us to see each other when we talk. We use them to take photographs, and they remind us that we have done so. We pick up the phone one day and, with no prompting on our part, it shows us a photo we took that same day or week the year before. And, so it was recently when my phone displayed for me photos taken during Thanksgiving 2019, which coincided with my mother’s 92^nd birthday celebration. Due to the current pandemic, I saw her this year on her 93^rd birthday only by phone.

Viewing those photos from 2019 took me to ones taken during Thanksgiving 2017, when Jane and I traveled to Alabama by train to celebrate my mother’s 90^th. It is the stark irony of those photos that elicits this brief reflection in this time of Covid. Jane is standing at a grave-site in the oldest cemetery in Birmingham, where the headstone of her great-great grandfather is the oldest one there. Several generations of her family, an early and prominent one in that city, are buried there. Those photos are the last I took of her. She was gone not two month’s later, taken suddenly by the flu.    

In this December of 2020, many if not all of us are doing our best to not be taken by Covid-19. The statistics show the extent to which we are failing and have been failed. The experts in whom we place our faith tell us that we are entering what may be the darkest period of this pandemic, due largely to the intransigence of compatriots – including elected leaders, particularly our outgoing-President. It is difficult at this point to see a future beyond this present, but we know it is there. Here’s hoping that a ten-year-old child today, now watching classmates and teachers on a screen rather than in a schoolroom, know it as well.